Disembodied,
the poem provokes longing. Its incorporeity is inscribed in myth: the severed
head of Orpheus adrift on the Aegean Sea.
Though separated, the head continues to sing. The song it sings is either a
lament of exile from the body or a celebration of freedom from its material
prison, depending on the direction of the winds.

**********************************************

Inlay (Elaine Scarry) Donna
Stonecipher

I.

If only our troubles were those of the architect. In which the solution
is born at the same time as the problem. The architect has simply to work her
way toward it, through a dark tunnel or a prescribed maze. Which proves the
marvelous fact that there are cases in life where ingenuity is not the primary
virtue --- but rather tenacity.

2.

You keep doing it, he said to her one night. You keep moving across town
and then feeling the “lost” streets pulling you back like a siren song, all
disfigured by hope. This time let it be the swan song. Let the dying swan glide
through your canals and then sink to the bottom like a piece of Cleopatra’s
dysfunctional bateau.

3.

You can know the aristocratic pretensions of a scene by the proportion
of sky to landscape, she ruminated in the museum. The more sky, the more
elegant the tiny Russians strolling along the embankment twirling parasols. If
a sky can be profligate, what limit the bankrolls nestled in fustian pockets?

4.

Which would you rather your head be full of, facts or ideas? (Clouds,
riposted the cosmopolitan.) Facts are finite, said the dreamer. Ideas reproduce
exponentially, said the monkey. But inside every fact is an idea, said the
beautiful girl. But inside every idea is a beautiful girl, said the man in a
brown study.

5.

The voluntary exile dreamed of the clouds that form over her native
city. There she knew the names of all the birds. She had learned this
voluntarily, by application. But all kinds of knowledge collects like sediment
in local minds, useless but for ballast --- which, as all exiles know, should
never be underestimated.

6.

If only our troubles were those of the town planner. On our freshly
prepared grid, where to position the park, the town hall, the elementary
school, the bored housewife fucking the plumber? The town is a given. The town
waits like a fate for the town planner, who slowly reveals it with a blue
pencil.

“Daydreaming
originates in the volitional”

7.

“Ideally, I’d look like a Spaniard, fuck like a Serb, and make money
hand over fist like an American,” said the cosmopolitan sitting in Hong Kong, drinking a caipirinha. Only the American
bristled. The reflective man, the genius,
the seer, the torchbearer, the radical, the spiritualist, the moral high-hogger

8.

She had climbed all the stairs of pleasure and was shocked to find no
issue at the top. So pleasure has a glass ceiling: or, the idea of more
pleasure can form in the mind, but the fact of more pleasure in the body can
not. The girl lying next to her bed could not stop putting her hand into the
bag of little candy hearts.

9.

The citizen has ideas about the architect, but the architect has ideas
about the citizen. The architect needs the citizens to people the plaza. But do
the citizens need the architect? Yes, for the architect tells the citizens
precisely how far they are willing to trust modernity --- and precisely how far
they are not.

10.

If only our troubles were those of the bellboy. In which the world
shrinks to a glowing pageant of installation and abandonment. The problem of
the polished permanence of the temporary. And the vicarious thrill of holding
all that has come under another’s sphere of influence in one’s own gloved
hands.

11.

For years, she admitted one night, my greatest fantasy was this: buying
a house, arranging it with my things, shopping for sofas and hassocks, and then
locking it up and renting an apartment in a neighboring city. In the apartment
I would always have flowers on my kitchen table: dahlias in September, and
peonies in late spring.

12.

Facts are finite, but ideas feed on facts to achieve infinity. The
architect sat down to his plans. The voluntary exile never learned the names of
the birds in her adopted city. Each bird was a foreigner, flitting through
trees and signing a beautiful mysterious song she hadn’t the remotest desire to
comprehend.

**********************************

from

A Poet's Alphabet by Mark Strand, in The Weather of Words

O is for Oblivion. I feel as strongly about it
as I do about nothing. Forgetfulness, the fullness of forgetting, the
possibilities of forgottenness. The freedom of unmindfulness. It is the true
beginning of poetry. It is the blank for which the will wills. And O, lest I
forget, O is also for Ovid, II Naso, the first of the great exiles, whose book
of changes, whose elevation of changing to a central place in the kingdom of
the imagination, has made me wish to mention him, even if he has not directly
influenced the poems I write. After all, what could I take from his beautiful
telling of Echo and Narcissus or Jason and Medea? How could I duplicate the
Song of Polyphemus? Maybe if I worked very hard I could produce a stumbling
version of his fluency, and maybe a pale likeness of a few of his monstrous
particulars, but never the two together. He was an effortless surrealist, a
poet of boundless charm. And all it got him from the puritanical Augustus was
exile to the shores of the Black Sea, in a
place called Tomis.